


The shortest poem is a name.

by ApollosLyres



Category: Original Work
Genre: Poetry, Really these are just a collection of poems I have written
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 4,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26664667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApollosLyres/pseuds/ApollosLyres
Summary: A collection of my poetry.Title is a quote by Anne Michaels.“It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak thewords that matter.”— Kate DiCamillo
Kudos: 2





	1. While It Lasted

This love is not about you, it’s about how his lips translate her name into poetry. The kind that makes every other word sound ugly.  
How his love blooms and dies is the greatest tragedy.  
You cannot save him from himself. Let his sins sink in and let his laughter echo underneath the memory of it all.  
He is your haunting. The ache finds its home inside of you, burrowing into your anatomy.  
You taste the blood in his mouth and feel the flesh of his palm. The echo memory of his touch burns inside your stomach.  
It’s impossible to swallow the enormity of this feeling. It is as real as the reflection of your broken mirror, tangible enough to imprint upon you.  
The cradle of his arms will not hold you again, instead, they are wrapped and broken with another. Raw and ribboned are the scars like silver upon your skin.  
Artists are the most dangerous lovers.  
The puzzle of your heart is strewn into pieces upon his bathroom floor now.  
The crescent of the light across his bare back beside you in bed, the humble opening of your soul, the gentle trembling of his kiss all rot upon the dirty tile.  
Has he ever loved you, or only the idea of you?  
How do legends love?  
Do not breathe as he kisses her, do not look away.  
Let the madness of him run its course through you.  
Love is the most mortal thing there is.


	2. To My Lover

Press your palm to mine  
Let our fingers entwine in tender touch.

Yes, I have loved him, I do love him,   
I will hold him with single-minded, simple sweetness.  
This need not be a legendary love, it is enough to feel for him now, for all we are worth.  
This love is neither the first, nor the last, nor the foundation, nor the crumble.  
Moons waning is echoed in dawn’s birth, night corrupted with the sun’s breach, I will trace the sky light thinking of his place inside the hull of my heart.  
Proud jaw and swift, splendid hands are backlit with the sky and it was in that moment I realized love could be joy.  
Forget-me-not’s bloom with his presence.  
I kiss his eyelids in repentance, memorize the murmur of his lips,  
There is no peace but for this.  
He is drunk with courage that I have long lost,  
Too many heartbreaks have robbed me of the raw and ribboned youth he breathes.  
His careless caress is a traitor to his wisdom but here he is, here he is, here he is.  
I tremble as I kiss the arch of his neck.  
My soul speaks for him.  
I am undaunted in the face of his beauty because I have known it. I have written my pen dry with the thought of him.  
We will exist within the eternity of song.   
Philosophers will pry and poets will cry, and there will be no answer.  
This is my privilege, to love so enormously.  
It is his gift that has honored me this.


	3. Sweetest sorts of Secrets

There is danger in poetry.  
Harken the heaving hunched form of a child’s sorrow.  
Crows peck pathetic pillows of flesh clean from bone and he cannot breathe.  
He cannot breathe he cannot breathe he cannot breathe.  
Tumultuous, treacherous is the thundering space beneath your chest. It does not falter where you do, it is not a timid sort of madness.  
Blooming bruises battle beneath my skin, fragile with malignant memories.   
You exist now on the precipice, edging between the space of ghost and living.  
Feel the fingertips of his hand trace your skin. Hate him for his holiness. Take his touch and take how his teeth tear your youth from your throat. Vomit upon his temple floor. Do not flinch. Do not hesitate. Mourn only the bloody sheets and pray limp inside of his hold, palms pressing into the cracks of your body.  
Gorge, gather his grip and turn it into art. Choke on every syllable.   
Vows are whispered beneath blankets and you must make peace with the inevitable.   
Beauty is terror and anger is grief and when was I last honest about the source of the hollow of my heart?  
Now the you is me and our stories intertwine in holy matrimony, diverging and divorced in mere moments when this poem parts from your thoughts.  
I was you and I was him and I have long lost where I was once without him.  
Nothing remains in me besides the goodness of you.   
Swallow the bullet of broken apologies, I am captive to the blooming blessing of a man who tucked my sorrows into his pockets.   
Victimhood is it’s own home, found comfort in the cavity of my stomach.  
How do you make warnings sound so pretty?


	4. Lovers Long Lost

There are those never meant to stay,   
There to mold and grow you,  
Before they are on their way.  
Broken poetry and gifted mistakes,  
From a love that only aches.  
Imprinted into a youth fell wayside,  
There are the remnants of tears who have no time to be wept.  
It rots away at a home harrowing,  
In the destruction of its foundation,  
In those who it trusted in its creation.   
The art of forgiveness is forged from fragile fragments of a heart.  
Soul bruising sweet sadness swept you under her humble hold,   
If you must live with this misery might as well make it into gold.  
Under-sympathetic sadness swept away, tragedy standard set for the future.   
Stubborn, selfish love, a paradoxical paradise.


	5. My love is the lasting kind

This is an ode to the angels I have wrestled  
This is the cumulation of all that I have wrought and reaped   
This is how I gather my courage together   
This is the familiar urge to press our palms against one another  
This is how our kisses melt into vows  
This is how I have yearned for you   
This is my gratitude giving way to resentment  
This is healing hollowed homes hiding inside of me  
This is learning how to trace the sharpened edges of my body   
This is teaching contentment in loneliness   
This is welcoming a long-lost friend into my arms once more  
This is our tragedy in poetic prose  
This is the moonglow bringing my mood in with the tide  
This is the nectarine whose sweet juices sour with neglect, bitterly feeding the mold and maggots  
This is the slaughterhouse sort of love  
This is how I say goodbye.


	6. In which I learn to say goodbye

I was eight when I first went to a funeral, his casket too tiny to hold the grief of his mother  
Both of us not even nearing a decade old then  
Now I am here alone with myself and I think of her  
So many times, my mother nearly took her place, although not due to a careless car  
But because of my own careless cause  
That was the same year I first tried to die  
The pursuit of such didn’t cease till I was long into my teens  
Although even now, in the quiet moments I remember the echo of that desire  
So, I whisper his name  
Summon the ghost of his memory   
And forget the meaning of goodbye  
Because I have never seen someone truly gone


	7. Ours

My mother’s touch lulls me to peace  
Her skin is the same as her fathers  
And his the same as his mothers  
Our blood has traversed dangerous fields  
Spilled to the ground and watered the greenery  
Nourished the seeds that were then plowed  
By the same men who slay us  
Our language, loud and open turns to whispers  
With the need to be unseen for the sake of the women and children  
Our people are the resilient kind  
Which is perhaps why I am still here  
Years of mangled childhood and twisted memories  
Make way for a man, grown into his shoes  
I did not believe I would make it this far  
But my mother has  
And her father before her  
And his mother before him  
Our veins tell a story of survival  
Echoed through generations  
This is who I have been  
And Who I Will Be


	8. Dear Lavinia

She was a lightly, lively, lingering presence. Her delicate, diligent gaze gathered gracious amounts of men across the lands, including him.  
Him.   
The longing and yearning became churning aching. He wanted her, and that was a ‘yes’. He saw her, and that was his claim. Who knew how easily women could become belongings? Then there were them. Because men are always men. Because men wanted and she was to be wanted by. Woman, what woes wilt your soul now? She should know by now; power prevails performative in her grasp.  
She needed to go   
or run   
or leave   
or just be gone.   
Tongue torn,   
tremble,  
her limbs lodged into the dirt.  
Silence reveals the violence.  
And even now, numb in neglected healing halls she watches how her brother’s hands bloody. Because they are men too. Because women’s stories are men’s tragedies. Because women cannot wield the vengeance, only have it enacted upon their behalf.   
Where is there to go to when everywhere is mans? Because she was man’s. Where is the escape? Where are you going? Why can’t you speak? When is love meant to hurt?  
Say something.  
Say something.   
Say something.  
Do you know what mercy is? Men do, when they kill you.


	9. 2020

Heartache and wistful isolation claim sorrow swelled sickened souls. What is the answer to mortality arriving bare upon your doorstep?  
______________________________________________________________________________  
I stare at the sky and feel the enormity of being eclipse my very self.  
Here I am, just to the left of myself. Everything tilted just askew and it's not quite right, it's not quite there, it's not what it is.  
Once I was driving alone along a highway hidden within the woods and I saw what certainly should have been a deer, expect it was a little too large and a little too sharp and a little too dark. It looked at me with eyes that were not there, and I felt the phantom grip of limbs unseen. I felt the tilt of reality blink and the fractals reverberate in my bones.   
What is the horror of a thing that should not be? What is it when you see what was not meant to be found, be visible, be perceived? How many men have been brought to madness staring at eyes adjacent and teeth too many?  
Because I am standing here beneath blood-soaked skies and blinking away the aches of lives I have not lived and things I have not seen. And it is wrong it is wrong it is wrong.  
A crow pecks the rotting, maggot-infested flesh of the mind no longer fastened to the ever-tightening string of reality, taunt with the stress of our circumstance collective.


	10. A Love Letter to Shakespeare

Stand ready, two blushing pilgrims meet  
Sweet bliss hiding between the mists of dawn  
Boundless civil hands, such unclean continuance of an age to mend  
Profane your unworthy soul whilst I smooth thine sea with a gentle kiss  
A prayer in use, grant thou faith beyond which heavenly matters do attend


	11. Eden’s song of moving loves

It was that night he avowed himself to his mantle.   
Cradling the crane of the flush of his neck against the palm, lips brushing the sweet lingering of his collar.   
A wonder, his depth brought with only a glance.   
The spot of joy laid between the breasts of an adoring suitor.   
A heart made glad about the presence of such a sight of pale contrast.   
His favor looked the lips he drew out whispered sweetness and promises.   
Skill with warranted passions between the two became a natural ode.   
A communion of the death of lonesome burden, consummation spilling between open mouths.   
Concordance of the tenderness of a moonlit rendezvous, dimensions of the taste of the sea in a single meeting between touches.


	12. Sea-Soaked Lovers

Who of two I have known, to the wind given and valiant sea’s rocking we share  
Sun stained skin whispering between wayward men, a holy hound of a forsaken flesh and a yearning stomach  
Churn with a settling domesticity, whispering into his ear “darling”  
You love him, all the same, no matter how he breathes out a winter, you embrace his curving inward figure  
Voyage across world and entireties and here he lay beseeching all past sins between other men who look too little and too much like one another  
Wax and wane and allow god the burden of judgment   
Consolations of the gentle utterance into an abyss of being   
What they do holds a consecration of its own  
Speaking it to one another, feeling it be so  
Dreary lay an old lifetime past as the winds and seas pull them forward.


	13. Trauma's Keeper

Shame his teacher, a boy who found no golden light so precious as the gloom in his crevice of a breast.   
False to God and to man, staining his orifices with a leaking passion.   
Brood in any assemblage, dissuaded by the effervescent nature of man and the dulcet comforts such a chance of souls.   
Harbinger of a tragic sort imbibes the interest of a man too eager.   
Unacquainted with perversity is how the self-constrained figure may describe such a kind.   
Plucked as a rose from a bush of the puritan woods is how in turn the man described him.   
A soul treasure possessed indefeasible requital of joy and torture contained within themselves perhaps.   
Capable of love and endowed with retribution.   
An irony knew best by the keeper, although he speaks now for it.   
Thou who knowest what lies in such a man’s heart.   
A wild appeal made through touching lips caressed with tenderness.   
A quality of awful sacredness between such a relation.   
The unobtrusive passion between men lays a worried heart whole.


	14. Disclaimer

When I write of love it is a vine curling along the outside of my skin  
Deeply ingrown in my tongue, choking out poetry for private prayers  
Sweet whispers seeping from the pores of a man too eager to dream away the way that love kisses his palm  
Cradling it in a hand trembling, it is a simply complex sort of existence.


	15. Only Three Lines

The willow tree envelops a phrase of heartache into its curling vines  
Burning lungs suffocate out the choking pleas  
Sun stained and woeful in the face of your lingering past.


	16. Closure

Tuck the tragedy between clenched teeth.   
Salvation in confession has been abandoned with his death.   
Unfold the memory with an ease that leaves bitterness in between trailing breaths.   
Vocabulary lacking enough to suffocate out your heartbeat.   
Unspoken vows are broken as his twisted mangled body.   
There is no poetry in his demise.  
It is a malicious, invading force, absence.   
Love letters you write sound like suicide notes eerily in retrospect, his lover says.   
You say he always lacked tact.   
Impatient as he is, you always assumed he would know.   
Decomposition never was fitting for him.   
Burning was your specialty.  
But you managed to always be in tune with his winter breaths.   
Their ceasing beats you knew enough that this fall from grace belongs to you both.   
Paradise was never something you wished for with the exception of this moment for him.   
The difficulty of consistently existing left him fighting, refusing the gentleness of releasing into that good night.


	17. Marked

It is in the chest the pains ache first. His spiral into an Eldritch madness had been limited to lonely moments, although his retreat into isolation was more frantic as of late. Only mad in the lonesome darkness, yet the light burned and he sought refuge away from even his lover. The brief moments of clarity become few and far between. Efforts offered from his lover and friends appreciated, but left a void with the detached madness eclipsing him. It spread and dug into him, pouring over as tentacles filled his stomach and the black eggs filled his vomit. The worms came no matter how he tried to scratch them out. 

A solution presented with the glint of a kitchen knife. Trembling hands cradling the dainty thing till it collided inside him. Panting between fail swoops of the blade, the madness was vanquished.

The rot of death was a stench foul upon the room. Maggots feeding off the browning blood and staling meat. Blood leaching life force from the tense muscles contracted till gone limp with the passivity of an ill met end. The crow caws outside a bedroom window, signaling the arrival of a man dawned in the dark coat, echoing a harbinger of death. A scene perhaps familiar, grievous upon sight and infecting the soul, where he lay. Wound emptying guts strewn about a stained floor, the greeting of a ghostly demise awaited.


	18. Consumed

It wouldn't stop. The buzzing only moved. It curled inside him, shifted into his skin.   
Even with His presence, lovely and suffocating, he would wake with his nails tearing away at his skins, blood staining their sheets. Perhaps it shook him just as well in turn, but even with the disturbance echoing off the man he loved, the madness was too deeply taken. 

The puking followed not long after. Eating and sleeping becoming scarce, he found the sanctity of his body corrupted. Contaminated. It was parasitical and malicious. It was after the first tearful session of vomiting that he saw them. The eggs, the worms writhing. It wasn't long till he felt them inside, crawling. He was buckling, the weight of existence was rotten for him, crushing and suffocating all senses. The tentacles choked him. 

He stared at the screen, remnants of his mother's research reflected. Data of their failures and what doomed them both ultimately. He grieved his brother more than his mother somehow now, though likely he was alive. This madness was lonely. 

Foreign beings were eating him inside out, poisoning his entire being with its cursed spite.   
But of course, that could not last. Nothing could with how he was deteriorating. It was frantic and begging. He could not remember for what. Perhaps it was for him to stay, perhaps to kill him. He didn't ask Him in the morning.


	19. The poem I loathe

A worldview christened from late nights, the somber stale air in comforting through the panic you guided yourself through. Your younger years were scourged with dramas of the wounds inflicted. It was not a peaceful pacing into a semblance of adulthood. Achingly you grew, volatile in the heart. There is nothing solid or permanent, a disappointment that leaves you empty and barren. There is a struggle, for is it better to love and die or to never have loved at all? The piercing of it is not one you will recover from, of this you are well cognizant. 

Flawed and weaker than you care to admit, it is true how you pour you're all in too fast and too hard. How quickly you wish to give and receive in return. It's something pounding inside you, and you hate it. You despise yourself and the world for it. No matter how you curse, it bleeds on within you. 

She is a bright thing, blinding and breathtaking despite the warnings. When you are burned, you pull away. But you return. A fire is meant to be consumed, and you would not hesitate to surrender yourself as an ember for her comfort. You fear and during the darker nights, you question yourself. 

It was eight, the first time you nearly died. Innocent and unmarred by the further cruelty time wrought. 

She speaks to you and you let yourself live a little bit longer. The peace may not last, but it is in her words and gaze you find a glimmer of hope you long abandoned.


	20. Her II

Twisting your heart within your chest, breathing uneasy, you surrender yourself. Don't question if she knows it or not, surely within action she may see. You say nothing, learning quiet careful on your tongue. Vulnerability never appealed less than when you were in love. Horrifying in its power, appealing only within her palms. Raised out, willing and urging you closer, you abide despite the warnings. Long taught from holding too tightly to the flame that little good comes from giving so much to any person. To love is the surest way to ruin yourself. 

It was shown plainly in your uncle, drinking himself to death. Your grandmother forced to solitude by a long-dead husband. Some younger naivety you held, blown away with the first attempt of love. You desecrated the memories and waxed after an ideal demise. 

How many times already have you cried for her? How many hours, how many anxious nights? The intimacy of tenderness inherently torturous with a heart as yours. 

She reassures and comforts with gentle words, gracing her on the more straining nights where she threatens to burst apart. But when she does not lash out she hides inside himself. Curling in and grabbing hold of the uneven pieces of herself. Cutting into her palms, he knows he is no martyr. Just a fathom of his own impending destruction. Her being is a self-inflicted prophecy.   
She is someone like air. No matter how she frets herself a burden, there is no one more capable of raising her up. She has passions and thoughts less shared that are intriguing, she has talents to marvel at, she is her own best thing. She stands on her own, lovely and beloved beyond her own beliefs.   
She will not drag her down. Rather she waits till the day she leaves, inevitable and latent between them. For every second they still share, she breathes.


	21. Confession

I. He is vivacious and unsettling, a penchant for grace in opposition to his heavy shoulders. Containing him in this mortal coil somehow became an act of violence against him, and now he weeps in your arms for his sin. 

II. You are poised naturally, a steady form for his volatile form to return to. Cruel and gracious, his lips meet yours and you cannot envision any reality beyond this. The faintest flush upon his neck, how his vein pulses under your thumb. You caress his standstill avoidance and draw out his aching soul. Noon lit and humble under your gaze, he is both a man and not. And you love him. 

III. Muttering a truth on kiss-swollen lips causes a breath to tremble between you both. And you embrace it back into your chambers. Keen for pleasure and pains, he takes it from you in a fashion akin to desperation. Your gifts upon him feel too natural to be swayed away.


	22. Enemies or Lovers

It was a woeful sort of work.  
Blushing tip of a kiss upon the stain of your being.   
How to grasp a universe and remain stable simultaneously?  
Dissatisfaction. It radiated off him at times, in nearly a debilitating extent.   
He wondered if he ever thought about killing him.   
Probably, was the answer he often concluded to.   
It didn't stop him from tracing his fingers along his spine or kissing his hands, though.   
He didn't remember which of them suggested playing chess.   
More often than not they were brought to a stalemate, and it left an odd bitter aftertaste.   
It felt like a mockery, a metaphor that he could only barely grasp.   
When he speaks of Gods he utters maliciousness.   
He doesn't bother uttering at all.   
Instead, he scribbles some more notes.


	23. How G-ds Fall

He had little interest in becoming easy to love. What point was there, if he was uninterested in returning anything related to such a subject. 

He is meant to be something great. G-dly. His existence a ripple, a warning. So far above and so furious is his clarity of what he is and could be. All doors are open and the promise of the world is what he reaches for. Not a man.

He had a proud jaw that rose with condescension. Destruction followed his wake, and really, he should know better. The way they despise one another and adore and worship and fight against is a passion he fell to. The world was meant to belong to him. Mortal indulgences to be mocked. Those who get to close are burned and destroyed and discarded, as is inevitable. 

He does not breathe when they kiss and he watches. Diligent. The first few times they sleep together it is dismissed as a simple pleasure with little meaning. And that is that. Until it very much is not.

Never before has a body been a temple. Fucking was never meant to be making love. Worship was never before found in his whispers. They became oaths he never intended to utter. Tender is a war he fights in himself. Laughter becomes warm and it burns in his throat. He is inside you. Will he burn for you?

The sheer risk of connection is the only thing that fills his body with apprehension. Something too akin to fear to sit right. 

The weight of who he is, it is not lost on him when he comes. Treacherous was his existence. He cursed it with each gentle kiss. Breathless, he could not erase the way his heart skipped with such simple looks. A betrayal inside himself. Swallowing, it felt more like a nervous breakdown than he expected love to be. It was not suited for something like him. He should burn him, let him fall and feel the way ascension became impossible with a single man. To be held often by the cause of your undoing was what left his skin itching. He was never very good at being content. Swallowing kisses and cradling his thighs had no right to be as alluring as they were. This duality was unraveling and all-encompassing. Blooming heartaches too akin to bruises leave something bitter in their wake. 

He is broken and still, he touches the wound of him without hesitance. Terrible and drunk with a beautiful sort of doom. Love was always a risk. Surrendering to a fragile urge that felt like the only option. Holding such violent things in their weakest moments is not what he knew. But learning his bones and kissing his scarred ribcage. 

Learning to kiss with his eyes closed was a hurdle he did not expect. But whispered words urged it, and the desire to sleep with this man who had eyes so blue was enough. He did not stop moving until the stillness settled over them with the exhaustion of night. He was more apt for it than he. It was an impossible thought, that he could ever leave.


	24. What is a curse but love?

He says it means nothing. 

And he makes love to him. He whispers words and gives promises and the crook of his neck and caress of his palm. He watches and smiles and it is softer than before. And his breath catches and his eyes close in kisses. He is tender and he holds you with a gentleness that is unlike anything he ever gives. He doesn’t look at other men with the sincerity you have caught in his gaze. The light in his eyes is visible to you, a gift few have been trusted with. He holds your hand for no other reason than to hold and touch you. He spends each night with you, makes you moonlit meals. He breathes in and makes vows to protect you. He leaves his throne of holiness to worship at your feet. 

And he says it means nothing. 

But you really both know better than that.


	25. Doctor Dan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A five-minute piece I wrote for a class. Warning for descriptions of blood, medical operations, etc!

The blood stubbornly stuck to his lab coat, soaked and staining the diluted white of the cloth. They kept clean coats in the back for such an occasion, preemptively accounting for the mess inevitable with his line of work. It wouldn’t do to have him go out meeting his patient’s families covered in their blood, that certainly would elicit some complaints. He loathed still the process of changing out, it nagged at him every time he abandoned the clothing for someone else to deal with cleaning. Regardless of how much he washed his hands the blood remained coated upon hands that never even made direct contact, always masked with gloves. But he felt it, an itch underneath his skin. Persistent maggots of anxiety burrowing into his flesh and tensing his muscles. It was a woman he operated upon last. Severed tendons and guts to be rearranged, the tinge of brilliant red of her insides in contrast to the dull grey of the operating table. In his younger years, he was intrigued and enticed by it. Now weariness wore upon him in weighted mass. “Doctor Dan-,” the intercoms chimed, reminding him nevertheless of his duty. There was little chance for escapism, his responsibilities remained present and demanding. Tearing himself from the sink where he lingered, he fingered the bloodied cloth of his coat once more before removing it at last.


End file.
